AppZen Taps AI To Catch Invoice Payment, Contract Errors

Automated expense report auditing company AppZen is introducing a new spend auditing platform to analyze supplier invoices using artificial intelligence (AI).

Reports in HR Technologist on Wednesday (March 27) said AppZen is expanding its offering to include auditing of vendor invoices, allowing businesses to automate compliance management of contracts and agreements related to master service agreements and pricing terms.

AppZen‘s audit solution automates the extraction of key information related to those agreements to ensure compliance when invoices are submitted to the accounts payable department.

In its announcement, the company listed several examples of some of the ways it has saved corporate customers money, including the identification of a duplicate invoice worth $135,000 that had already been paid, as well as cases in which invoice prices were not aligned with tiered pricing agreements as stated on a contract.

“The unfortunate thing is that once a contract is inked, finance teams do not have the bandwidth to ensure that the agreed-upon terms are being enforced,” said AppZen Co-Founder and CEO Anant Kale in a statement. “Things like purchase orders only solve a small part of the problem, and we quickly started to identify significant savings for customers when we applied our AI technology to bridge the gap.”

The company published a report last December that uncovered how the employee expense process can also cause wasted spend for companies that do not have the resources to review compliance and accuracy of each expense report. According to the company’s data, nearly 30 percent of expenses filed by employees in the professional services industry are flagged and rejected by managers, while the computer and network security industry similarly sees high rates of expense rejection.

“The major takeaway from this data is not that employees in certain industries commit more fraud,” AppZen noted at the time. “It’s that existing expense policies may need to be revisited to fit the behaviors of your specific workforce.”